Atop Everest, two Sherpas and a luxury watchmaker forged a friendship that changed their lives

Editor’s Note: This article was written for a Stanford narrative journalism class. Some student reporters pursued stories outside the San Francisco Bay Area on topics that would be of interest to Peninsula Press readers.

Lakpa Thundu Sherpa stands atop the summit of Mt. Everest with climber Wim Smets. Thundu and his fellow guide Ang Namgel Sherpa led a 2010 expedition that changed their lives and gave them new careers in watchmaking. (Photo: Samantha Larson/ Peninsula Press)

Hundreds of yellow, red and blue specks quickly appear every April in the valley below the 18,000-foot summit of Kala Patthar, one of Nepal’s most popular hiking destinations. The spots are clustered on a rocky field at the edge of the snow and ice that lies in the shadows of the world’s greatest monolith, Mount Everest. They are tents that make up a temporary village known as Everest base camp. In the spring of 2008, Michael Kobold hunkered down in one of these tents and, under the curious gaze of Ang Namgel Sherpa, assembled a mechanical watch.

The owner of Kobold Watches, Michael hatched his scheme to start a watch company a decade earlier during a class project at Carnegie Mellon University; he decided to continue the venture after the class ended, essentially because he didn’t much like college and was bored. He founded the company with $5,000 when he was 19, working out of his apartment in Pittsburgh. It proved to be successful beyond expectation — in the first year he grossed $85,000. His watches now sell for as much as $10,500 each and can be found on wrists ranging from Bill Clinton’s to Bruce Springsteen’s.

“I’m still sort of amazed,” Michael says. “I didn’t think I’d be running my own watch company for more than two semesters.”

Unlike most others at Everest base camp that spring, Michael had no desire to scale the great heights. He was there as the official watch sponsor for Sir Ranulph Fiennes, declared by the Guinness Book of World Records the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer.”

Michael doesn’t fit the watchmaker stereotype. Rather than being steeped in tradition and methodology, he gets through life by immersing himself in what he loves to do and somehow, almost naively, stumbles from one adventure to another. It was a hair-raising experience on the Autobahn, sustained by Michael’s training in tactical driving, that peaked Fiennes’s attention, initiating the friendship that would lead Fiennes to leave his longtime sponsor, Rolex, to join the Kobold team.

“Because I wasn’t climbing, I had a lot of time on my hands,” Michael says. So he brought the necessary parts to put together a couple of movements, the internal mechanism of a watch, to keep himself occupied. In the process he discovered that his boyhood-hobby-turned-profession caught the attention of another crew at base camp: the climbing Sherpas.

“Sherpa” most broadly means an ethnic group of Tibetan Buddhists from the mountainous regions of Nepal. Ethnic Sherpas also typically use the word for their last name. In western culture, the Sherpa people are most famous for the roles they have played in the expeditions to the high Himalaya. Climbing Sherpas are still hired by, and crucial to the success of, the bulk of Himalayan expeditions.

Mostly young locals from the Khumbu Valley with dozens of Himalayan summits under their belts, the climbing Sherpas on Everest are well accustomed to the professional climbers, doctors and madmen adventurers who make the pilgrimage to the world’s highest point each year. But Michael and his craft were something entirely new to them. In a setting where the goals people strive for are physical and gargantuan, in a country where time is considered only in a relative sense, Michael bent over an array of miniscule parts spread on a folding table, seemingly engaged in a quaint and whimsical enterprise. Continue Reading >>